I have programmed a large, commercial level mobile application using Flash Builder 4.6. It is working GREAT when ran on both iOS and Android devices.

I was using the trial version of Flash Builder 4.6 to develop this application. I used the states feature that FB has built in to handle Portrait, Landscape, and Phone / Tablet configs. This means that I built 4 different layouts for all 8 of my views in my mobile application. Using the design view in FB 4.6 was what allowed me to do this.

I have to say that I LOVE Flash Builder so far. GREAT tool.

My trial ended just last week. I had to purchase version 4.7 of the software, only to find out that they REMOVED the design view from the software.

All complaining aside, what have other programmers who are in the same boat as me done as a solution? I would like to continue to program in AS and Flash Builder as I have taken the time to write the application and learn the whole platform.

As it stands now, I am in the process of downgrading my liscence keys from 4.7 to 4.6, but in order to do this I had to RETURN my retail version of FB 4.7 premium (bought online) and buy a volume liscening version (NOT through adobe, only allowed to do this through a reseller such as CDW). then once I have a key for 4.7 through volume liscencing, it can be downgraded to 4.6.

I'm hoping to get input from others in the same boat. Did you change Programming languages? if so, to what? Did you change IDE's? If so, to what?

The design view was used by many people (such as yourself), but many Flex developers just don't need it and create their design from code using MXML or even actionscript.

As a designer it may seem more convenient to drag and drop components, but I tend to think of MXML in a similar way to HTML - it's just as easy to write it as it is to try and use a design tool.

Unfortunately there is no alternative designer to replace the FB one, but it doesn't mean you have to abandon Flex or FlexBuilder to use the technology - it just requires gaining an extra skill in development to create the interface using markup in place of a design tool.

I know it's not the ideal solution for many, but that's the way things are.

Personally, I stopped using Design View very early on because I found MXML easier to work with.

I actually do NOT use the design view for "drag and drop" of components. I write the MXML instead. What I use the design view for is the placement of controls, via X, Y and width / height. In my example above, I have 4 different settings for the various states: portrait, landscape, phone, tablet. The design view allowed me to see the design of the form based on what state I was in, what orientation the device was, and what device I was on. This was SO HELPFUL for tweaking things. I have the data setup and the web service calls all done, and am in Beta testing with the app.

The Beta testing resulted in alot of things like - move this control over a little, put a space here, etc etc. The only way to do that is to change a value in the MXML then run the program. Well what if my program has 8 views, and the view I am working on is view 8? Does that mean I have to go through all 8 views, entering data and such, until I hit view 8 just to see if hte placement of a control is correct?

That is the insanity here and it has me very worried right now, to be honest.

Well, I'm not responsible for the removal of the facility and indeed in the long term you will need to live without it, however you used to make use of it.

The precise placement of items in views shouldn't be too onerous - you can either write a small testbed to open view8 directly, or screen capture view8 and use another program to align your controls to a grid and use those settings in the code. Laying out controls isn't hugely difficullt.

It's an inconvenience rather than insanity.

Whatever we both may think about this, design view is gone post 4.6, and we need to work with the tools that we have, not the ones we would necessarily wish for.

Have you had the chance to program a large mobile application, for various platforms all at once, and various devices all at once? That necessitates multiple states for each view, and differing layout of controls based on the given screen sizes, dpis, etc. How is it possible to do this by running the program every time you want to verify how things look?

Let me put it another way - my program works like this. View 1 is for logging in. I make the user login each time the app loads. View 2 is a program selection view. View 3 is a list of items to choose from. View 4 offers filters to refine items. View 5 gives a list of items based on the filters before. And finally, View 6 is when a user picks just one item to get further information about.

My program makes use of a few custom item renderers as well as some skinning. All of this was easily managed using the built in design view, just as I do the same thing using the design view in Visual Studio. I do not have to run the program, login, then click through 4 views just to get to the final view to see if I moved the label over enough. Just running the program, and getting to view 4 might take 1 minute of time just to see if my changes look right. If it still doesn't look right, it's back to the MXML code, change the value to something else, run the program again. Another minute , just to see if the change is right THIS time. Does that make sense?

Where in v 4.6, I was able to switch to design view, look at it, switch back to mxml, make a change, switch back, etc. This whole process might take a minute TOTAL for MANY changes.

And after all, we can come back to the point of an IDE - to give a programming language a GUI to help assist in the programming of said language. Design view was a huge time saver and without it I personally (and I know alot of others) are losing a huge amount of time and convenience.

Finally - if you have a specific way of "writing a small testbed to open view8 directly" or somehow "screencapture view 8 and use another program to align controls" then I would be open to learning how. There must be a way that others do this to result in a professional looking GUI without using design mode. I'm looking for specific examples of how this is completed with specific pieces of software.

I'm not mistaking you for anything. I posted this for people to provide alternatives to not having a design view anymore. What you are doing is saying that "Oh well, boo hoo, its not there anymore". I understand that. If you don't have anything constructive to add then don't post replies in here.

I'm looking for other large scale enterprise developers who have existing applications built in Flash Builder who no longer have Flash Builder's design view to work with.

Are there 3rd party GUI layout software out there that I don't know about? Can I somehow use Visual studio to help me write the Flex code / design the UIs here?

And your statement about the flex world not coming to a halt - maybe not for you, but I can honestly tell you that many people are in the same boat as me. I am currently in the process of downgrading my liscence to 4.6 so I can continue to use version 4.6 of flash builder with the design view still available.

Because view 8 relies on data answers from the other views. View 8 only shows information based on the person who is logged in, and the selections they have made in view 2 3 4 5 6.

I could definitely create a test case for certain data in a static way, but then I have to change the static code I've built to test for other answers on the other views. All of this was done for me by setting things up in design view, then running the app.

There is no solution to losing design view that won't mean extra work in comparison with your existing workflow. That statement is not a vindication of either of our positions, just a fact and while design view was a great convenience, the longer term, if you stick with flex, is going to involve a differrent workflow.

If your views use an MVC architecture, instantiating them should involve injecting some sample data into the model and then invoking the view.

Lets say you have to design a view from scratch. It will contain maybe 6 controls arranged on the page. It needs to handle being ran on an ipad, an iphone, and a samsung galaxy. It needs ot handle portrait and landscape modes. how would you design the gui? Just go into Flash Builder, start throwing controls onto a view, and then testing the view by running the app?

Most people would draw rough wireframes of the view, sort out the general alignment and stuff and decide before they built it how the general layout would be. They can do that for differring screen sizes.

Nobody builds dialogs by throwing components onto a screen without thinking about it first - prefereably with a wireframe sketch on paper.

In many cases the precise positioning of controls can be taken care of by the layout manager. You can set up control sizes by percentage or fixed sizes and if you want fixed layouts, set the positions using an array of co-ordinates according to target screen size.

It should be easy to test dialog layout using sample data put into the model.

I kind of feel were competing in some kind of argument over design view, that shouldn't be necessary. I understand that you could use design view for prototyping, but so can you use a load of other tools, including pen and paper. Yes, I will admit to experimenting with layouts just by editing MXML and running the project.

I don't mean it to be an argument. I think this question has evolved into a more general question - how people attack programming something.

In my case, I will do some mock ups on paper but by and large, I program using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 in c#. Specifically, I have a large website that I program for as well as some windows forms applications that my company uses. Being able to visually lay things out has always been a godsend to me, as I'm not sure how I want the layout to be.

Maybe at first I want the drop down menu on the top, with a results box underneath. However, its decided to change that. Using design view, it was easy. Now, I have to refigure all the percentages and Hgroup / vgroup stuff I have built into my app. Even then, I can't be sure it will look right until I test it, which takes time. Its frustrating.

Whether you "mock up" or model the form layouts of each view beforehand, changes will occur. And because of this, changes are much harder to implement.

I too am vexed by the removal of the Design View. I use that feature constantly for not only laying out the view, but also for quickly locating the exact control I am trying to work with. For example, I might have a view that has many controls that overlap and sometime selecting the correct one to work with in MXML is a challenge. I switch to Design View, select the control I want to work with and switch back to Source View to make the code changes. It is a convenience that I am sad to lose.

As with you, I have found no alternative to this functionality and would love to know what others are doing. I hope you receive response from more that just a few people.

Lastly, I am concerned with the changes that are occuring in Adobe with regards to Flex, FlashPlayer, ActionScript and the related technologies. I have read the roadmap and understand the handoff of the Flex SDK to Apache, but it seems to me and others that Adobe has simply given up on this technology.

Just to add my 2 cents here, I completely agree, losing the design view is terrible for both reasons mentioned above. It is extremely helpful for placement of controls as well as finding the appropriate component to use. Obviously we can do it without the design view, but this signficantly increases my development and testing time. What was a quick and easy process is now much more tedious. With a couple of projects already done using Flash Builder/Flex, I'd hate to switch to another tool, but we'll have to see how this goes...

My 2 cents... as far as Adobe FLash Builder was in fact very good platform to develop mobile application I guess now it will be faster to learn ADT, Xcode and NDK rather than manualy position all controls for multiple screens and resolutions.

I totally agree with this, guys. When I got into the trial for Flash Builder 4.6 with the design view, I was BLOWN AWAY by how powerful this cross-platform development tool was. You could have told me it was 1,200 for the program and I would have paid that gladly. But taking away a huge chunk of the functionality that made it so easy for us, and then making the future of the product so uncertain with the Apache stuff just makes me nervous. Flash Builder was on the verge of a revolution in terms of how people developed apps, all it needed was a little more marketing to push it over the edge. Instead, Adobe seems like they are just giving up.

I think there is so much upset over the design view choice because of how great the tool was to begin with, and how its now seemingly sliding downhill.

If you're already using Flash Builder 4.6, there's nothing stopping you from keeping it installed at the same time as FB 4.7. I've got both installed side-by-side and they work just fine, as long as you're not opening the same project in both. Once a project is opened and saved in 4.7 it's difficult to get it back to 4.6.

The main point is this - if you need Design view, then keep using 4.6. The changes in 4.7 relate to some new debugging options for installing directly to the iOS device as well as the new ASC 2 compiler (for ActionScript projects only). Other than that, FB 4.7 uses the exact same Flex 4.6 SDK as FB 4.6. You can continue to overlay the newer AIR SDKs with Flash Builder 4.6 (in fact it seems easier with FB 4.6 anyway).

Yep, I've already gone back to 4.6. I only worry about just how long term a solution this is, eventually it won't be compatible with something... but *hopefully* it will be quite a while before that problem comes up.

Adobe has donated Flex to the Apache foundation and they are updating their tooling accordingly. ApachFlex is strong and will continue to grow through it's awesome community. But Flash Builder will continue to be updated as an ActionScript development tool, one of the reasons why Design veiw was removed. Design view is a Flex only tool.

The point here is that Adobe has control over the IDE now, while Apache handles the actual SDK code behind the scenes. Without having to worry about working on the SDK code that should free up Adobe to focus on making the IDE better for those programming in the language. And perhaps most importantly, to keep the IDE up to date with the packaging options for the 3 major mobile platforms - iOS, Android, and Blackberry.

The ability to program once, for any of those three platforms and any device (tablet / phone) makes it SUCH a powerful tool. Make it a little better, put back design view, and throw a little advertising behind the product and Adobe has a home run on their hands.

Sorry to rehash this old thread, but you are absolutely spot on. The power of FB4.6 was that I could easily see how all my targets worked in various resolutions and orientations, and importantly, states. When I make a config panel, for example, that may be easily done with a bunch of labels, buttons, textboxes, etc., and yeah, I could do it in code, but why? MrJ's right in saying that it is laborious.

So, we now have a big risk introduced to thousands of businesses - that is, Adobe is capable of doing anything at the drop of a hat. Example: palming off flex to apache. Example: removing design view and saying 'that WILL be fine with you'. How long will FB4.6 be serviced by Adobe? When that's no longer compatible (for whatever reason), what do the developers do? What happens when you get a squabble amongst the apache flex developers and they split the project, ( eg a bit like openoffice and libreoffice.)?

If I had to wrangle code just to make GUIs then I would have looked further afield. It's a great platform but I think it cannot be relied upon. Adobe is showing contempt for its developer customers by removing design view, I think, because it is quite difficult to maintain. But then, I'm not a multibillion dollar company...

Actually, to be more constructive, where should I be looking? I was tempted to try out JavaFX but that looks pretty unsupported to me. Any ideas, do I go c# or java or something? What's everyone else doing to mitigate this risk?

I actually never completed the downgrade to 4.6 so I've been using 4.7 without the design view. In 4.6, I would put a control on the view within design view. Then I would change each state, move it around, and it would be placed that way. In my case, each view has 4 states - portraitPhone, landscapePhone, portraitTablet, and landscapeTablet. I had to do this 4 times for each control under 4.6

So I went back and looked at my code in 4.7 and all the resulting code was these explicit x, y, height, and width values. See the code below:

So instead of continuing to try and modify these values by hand, then run the program, using trial and error, I took a different tact. I removed ALL x y height and width values. Then, I wrapped all the mxml code in either <s:HGroup or <s:Vghroup tags depending on what I wanted. Then I would just set the vertical and horizontal align on these groups. This allows everything to scale correctly based on the size of the view (each device really is a little different). Finally, I hand entered things like font sizes by using State Groups like this: fontSize.phone="12" fontSize.tablet="22". It still took testing on the screen to see how my layouts worked but it just makes the UI so much easier to change around and works so much better with out all the static stuff in it.

If you have some time , I would suggest taking one of your 4.6 views that has all these static variables and trying to modify it to work like I said above. My modified code (to do the same thing as above) is below:

They REMOVED Design View?!! Are they CRAAZY! I don't care a flip if "real" programmers find it more convienent to code objects in MX rather than use DV; I find DV far more convenient. The ease of use of components is the only attraction of Flash Builder for me. No DV, no Flash Builder for me.

Why on earth will somebody just decid to remove something that works, or was there a loud cry out from the flex community for it to be removed. That is the only feature that got me to buy a flash builder, if not then I will just download the SDK and run it on eclipse.

This is very INSANE!

What happened to rapid development? I don't believe one bit that typing is faster than drag-and-drop

Whoever made this decision should quickly call for a board meeting to get this restored without hesitation.

Disclaimer: The following is my opinion. I'm sure you have an opinion, too. Maybe quite different from mine.

This is an interesting thread -- not only because of the obvious frustration expressed by most, but also because of the lack of any response by an Adobe employee.

Yes, Adobe are the culprit here as they have no intentions of keeping Flash Builder and it's Design View in sync with whatever changes/improvements Apache Flex makes. And the Apache Flex project leaders have never stated that they will ever offer an IDE/design view to replace Flash Builder, so don't hold your breath. Adobe won't offer anything, either. Why should they continue development on the very thing they killed? It might somehow threaten adoption of whatever new and exciting HTML5 animation software they come up with. Like Adobe Edge Reflow, which features, of course, a design-view type of UI. Now we can make a pretty picture move across the screen! Just like FutureSplash (which would become Flash) could do back in 1995! And remember that Adobe's current CEO used to work at Apple. Draw your own conclusions.

The way I see it, another third-party would have to offer an IDE which is compatible with Apache Flex because I don't think AF has any muscle or talent to do that now--and my conspiracy theory is that they wouldn't want to p*** off the people at Adobe by doing so; they are still connected to one another. Adobe does not really want competition from AF, and vice-versa. The only way AF will survive is to work on bringing the Falcon JS compiler to market.

IntelliJ IDEA offers a primitive (in comparison the FB) Android UI designer. So maybe someone will come up with something similar for Flex.

Full disclosure: I've purchased Sencha Complete, which features something like Design View, and am learning the brave new world of building web sites based on Javascript technology from the 1990's. This is the new normal. As a former Flex developer, I accept the need to lower my expectations and how great I used to have it with Flex, but it really is all gone now. The types of things I could accomplish so quickly, easily and cheaply in Flex will have no replacement for several years (including using Design View--critical in my opinion). But you might as well start getting used to coding in Javascript now, as whatever happens in the next 3-5 years that will make you money will be based on JS, not ActionScript/MXML.

It was a fun ride while it lasted. But we are now "back from the future". It will be a while before we get to that future we used to live in.

Adobe HAD with Flex, a tool that allowed the Rapid App Development, cross platform / multi-OS, something that allowed development using common software practices quickly.

There hadn't been such a simple RAD tool since VB6. Yes I know that was Windows only, and then briefly web... the point is, it was easy and quick and powerful.

So Adobe has this for the modern world, and instead of standing up for their great product, and telling Steve Jobs, "NO" the world is NOT going to devolve into a backwards mess that also requires custom apps programmed on each OS... the Adobe Exec's abandoned it, and focused everything on the vapor-standard of HTML5.

...the HTML5+CSS+JS+JSframework+whatever_else_is_needed paradigm which requires hacking HTML, CSS, JS files together in a chimera mess of code... little or no visual help, and only able to do what Flash/Flex was able to 7 years prior.

So 4.7 being less than 4.6 in functionality... no great surprise there.

I'm not giving up on it though. I'm sick an tired of backwards HTML5 mess... and I laugh at the thought that Javascript is going to be become what Flash was 7 years ago WITHOUT someone plugging a specialized engine into each browser; either native or as a plugin...

In other words to get to where Flash was 7 years ago, you need that player/engine.

I'm following Flex to the Apache world... and HOPEFULLY someone will make a designer to let us visualize the MXML as we code it.

Or we could move back into the Flash app itself... and use Flash components... if they haven't killed those off too.

Anyways you are not alone, both in seeing the great potential that was in Flex, and in wondering what in the world people are thinking pushing software development BACKWARDS into the mess that is HTML5.

late to this discussion, but I agree with iBrent (huge fan, your youtube videos got me off and running with FB -- thanks)...

I run both versions... but am working on forcing myself to learn how to get used to strictly using code and NOT design view... I think it just makes me a stronger developer and forces me to think through things that otherwise I would just rely on the software to handle / do... if that makes sense.

Hi guys! i am also frustrated with the dicision to take out the design view from 4.7. I ve been using flex since version 3.6, and i even got two awards for innovations for a flex mobile platform i designed. When i first got flash builder 4.7 and i saw the luck of design view i turned to other options like native android.. i hope we will soon get an update containing what made flash builder different than other available tools...

It is good to always strive to be a better programmer. However the sole purpose for me and DV was to move things around to so as to get the best placement for them on the page. To change the x,y values in code alone is just to time consuming of a task compared to how fast you can do in with DV. Not to mention changing font sizes and colors.